In the current climate of emphasis on outcomes assessment, colleges and universities are working diligently to create assessment processes for student learning outcomes, competence in general education, student satisfaction with services, and electronic tracking media to document evidence of competence in graduates. Benchmarking has become a…

There are a number of reform initiatives underway in Turkey but some of these, which are concerned with curricular and structural changes, have encountered serious difficulties. This paper begins with a brief summary of school effectiveness and school improvement research guiding many educational reforms. It then gives some information about…

Over the past two decades, higher education in advanced capitalist societies has undergone a process of radical "reform". A key element of this reform has been the introduction of a number of accounting-based techniques in the pursuit of improved accountability and transparency. While the "old" accounting was to do with stewardship, the "new"…

A 10 year, longitudinal examination considered student performance for an Allied Health Distance Education (DE) program. The purpose was determining if students face-to-face in a classroom with an instructor performed differently than their counterparts located at a distance, taking class through an alternative delivery system. The question often…

How influential has the "US News" Best Colleges ranking been over the last twenty-five years since it was first started in 1983? In what ways does this influence manifest itself? There is strong evidence of the impact of the US News rankings among consumers, prospective students and their parents, and the higher education establishment in the…

Mirroring national trends, children of color in Washington state's King County are overrepresented at every point in the child welfare system and fare worse by most measures than are Caucasian children. The King County Coalition on Racial Disproportionality was formed to reduce and ultimately eliminate racial disproportionality in the county's…

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was tasked with identifying the key science concepts for science literacy in K-12 students in America (AAAS, 1990, 1993). The AAAS Atlas of Science Literacy (2001) has organized roughly half of these science concepts or benchmarks into fifty flow charts. Each flow chart or strand map…

The purpose of the provincial ESL (English as a second language) articulation process is to maintain high standards of quality in ESL programming at the public post-secondary institutions of British Columbia, as well as to facilitate access to programs at other public institutions for students wishing to transfer. This ninth edition of the ESL…

This article presents a model that instructional leaders can use to engage in a change process that fosters effective instructional change in school districts and individual school buildings, specifically middle schools and alternative middle schools. The authors describe four dimensions of leadership and explain how each dimension informs…

This report examines programmes for youth that combine learning in classrooms with participation in work in 10 Mediterranean countries: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey. It is one element, together with the development of a network of policymakers and experts from the…

This guide describes a process that can be used or adapted by school districts to evaluate standards and guide practitioners in developing locally appropriate benchmarks. The guide is not a training manual that provides a step-by-step guide for undertaking this effort with a group of educators; instead, it suggests an approach and rationale for a…

Suggests that strategic planning can help an organization mature and become more effective. Aims for strategic planning with a benchmarking objective, beginning with the information process-maturity model, assessing strengths and weaknesses, and identifying opportunities for process maturation. Finds all components of the reporting structure now…

An organizational learning capability survey was used to benchmark the process by which two companies tried to become learning organizations. Over 2 years, both significantly improved learning capability via different paths. One used generic interventions with a small group; the other targeted a small group first with later diffusion across the…

Benchmarks online retailing transactions against critical factors that impact online retailing. Findings suggest several areas that e-retailers should target for improvement, including the speed of home page loading, ability to translate into multiple languages, capabilities of search engines, security policies display, payment options, minimum…

Offers benchmarks to help campuses evaluate their efforts in supplying information technology (IT) services. The first three help understand the IT budget, the next three provide insight into staffing levels and emphases, and the seventh relates to the pervasiveness of institutional infrastructure. (EV)